Voices from the floor: Day 1 of Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012

What an excit­ing first morn­ing at the Adobe Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2012 in Salt Lake City. I am thrilled to have been able to attend the intro­duc­tory keynote, led by Brad Rencher, Senior VP and Gen­eral Man­ager of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing, Adobe, and other great speak­ers, includ­ing our CEO, Shan­tanu Narayen, our CTO, Kevin Lynch, and Facebook’s VP Global Solu­tions, Grady Bur­nett. There was lots of engag­ing dis­cus­sion today, but main themes focused on the con­cept of “your dig­i­tal self”, as well as con­tent per­son­al­i­sa­tion and pre­dic­tive marketing.

Every­one has a “Dig­i­tal Self” out there in the online space, and each of us poten­tially rep­re­sents a highly valu­able cus­tomer to busi­nesses with an online pres­ence. When I go online, I much pre­fer to see rel­e­vant ads that engage me as a con­sumer, rather than generic ones that aren’t tai­lored to my needs. Brad Rencher rein­forced the con­cept that ‘per­son­al­i­sa­tion mat­ters’. This has been a recur­ring topic recently so it was inter­est­ing to explore how this is evolving.

Dynamic, per­son­alised and engag­ing con­tent dri­ves today’s con­sumers to take action, and mar­keters must be able to deliver and opti­mise this in real-time. How­ever, for this to be effec­tive you must be able to under­stand the core data and ana­lyt­ics across per­son­alised expe­ri­ences, adver­tis­ing, pub­lish­ing and social mar­ket­ing. Shantanu’s view is that tech­nol­ogy is most pow­er­ful when it is used as an enabler, and today we def­i­nitely have access to mar­ket­ing tech­nolo­gies that enable this understanding.

If there is one thought I can leave you with from today, it is that based on this morning’s excit­ing announce­ment about the new releases of the Adobe Pre­dic­tive Mar­ket­ing Solu­tions, CQ5.5 and Dis­cover 3, I think mar­keters are in for a treat when it comes to enabling them to take con­trol of their data and drive the most rel­e­vant con­tent as well as analyse the data that will help them make bet­ter mar­ket­ing investments.

I don’t know about you, but I’m highly excited to be a mar­keter in today’s dig­i­tal world!

See you tomor­row morn­ing for a sec­ond day of excit­ing infor­ma­tion sessions!